Spinal Tap® Success Stories

Around 60% of all community pharmacies in England are connected to the NHS Spine via Quicksilva's Spinal Tap® messaging product. A recent roll out saw nearly 1500 pharmacies connected using Spinal Tap® in just 5 working days.

The Move to Paperless Prescriptions

Our customer, a market leader in Patient Medication Records (PMR) Systems, suppliers approximately 55% of the community pharmacies in England.

When in 2006 Connecting for Health (CfH-now NHS Digital) introduced the Electronic Transmission of Prescriptions (ETP) service – with a view to eliminating the paper based system for processing prescriptions, our customer had an urgent requirement for a means to access the NHS Spine.

CfH also required that any connecting system which was to handle Patient Identifiable Data, achieve Common Assurance Process (CAP) compliance – a notoriously difficult and time consuming process.

Quicksilva’s Solution

Having recognised the need to enable their systems to communicate with the NHS Data Spine, our customer selected Quicksilva’s pioneering broker service, Spinal Tap® to provide their PMR Systems with NHS Spine connectivity.

The result of work by Quicksilva to engage NHS Digital and system suppliers representing over 70% of English pharmacies, Spinal Tap® was chosen for its ability to allow our customers to rapidly adopt the functionality required to communicate with the NHS Spine, without the need for costly and protracted development work.

Taking the Pain out of CAP

Quicksilva took the headache out of the CAP process, designing resilient and scalable architectures that could serve the whole of the pharmacy market place; provision of an online test environment and expert project management. This resulted in our customer achieving CAP compliance in an impressive nine months.

Bearing a Heavy Load

Spinal Tap® acted as the central message broker for thousands of pharmacies, aggregating communication with the NHS Spine on their behalf. During peak dispensing periods, this meant a huge transaction load. Performance and resilience were therefore vital. Spinal Tap® delivered, and has since gone on to regularly handle over 5 million prescriptions per month.

Quicksilva deliver to their commitments
Director, pharmacy customer

Safe and Secure

Data communicated by the central broker included Patient Identifiable Data (PID) and as a result the system had to be secure. Quicksilva engaged with NHS Digital Information Governance team to gain approval for its system design and also to identify hosting facilities which met with the approved Information Governance standard (ISO 27001).

Quicksilva Take the Strain

Quicksilva recognised that guaranteed receipt of electronic prescriptions was business critical, and as such, so was the availability and performance of Spinal Tap®.

To meet this requirement Quicksilva’s Service Delivery Team provide a 24 hour, 365 day managed service, to impressive availability service levels. The service includes remote monitoring of over 300 system health and performance parameters in Spinal Tap®. With such close monitoring requirements, Quicksilva’s dedicated team are often aware of issues with the NHS Spine before NHS Digital and are able to shield our customer from some NHS Spine issues that could impact their systems, allowing them to focus on their core business.

To enable this level of monitoring Quicksilva designed and built its own monitoring system, capable of fulfilling the exacting standards and sheer volume of logged data.

Our monitoring system is yet another reason that Quicksilva’s managed services are valuable to our customers.